What Is Social Media Advertising?

Social media advertising is describing online paid efforts that advertisers use to target certain people in social media networks. The main aim of these efforts is to boost sales and attract new customers to the brand. Advertising on social media focuses on users whose social network profiles and activities are relevant to the brand. These users investigated similar products or their demographic characteristics and interests fit the target audience of the promoted product.

Why use advertising on social media?

Organization of social media ads campaign is an outstanding possibility to gain new followers. The magic behind any brilliant social media ad is the proper determination of target users and the placement of the ad directly within their news feed. You can choose the best platform for running your advertisement following your audience preferences and its cost is frequently lower in comparison to other ad types.

Several reasons supporting the usage of social media for advertising:

• Engagement growth – the idea is to engage your followers with diverse ads types and convert them into new customers
• Traffic growth – social media ads attract audience to your site for further product investigation and works as an additional channel for the promotion of your brand
• Conversion rate growth – remarketing in social media and advertising on users who visited your website can finally convert them into new customers

How Social Media Ads Meet Strategic Goals?

Any company has certain digital marketing plan and effective advertisement helps to realize this plan in a number of ways:

1. Drives sales – you target ads campaigns on people who require your product or service. A good approach is to analyze your audience data and determine certain segments of users to target. You can create separate campaigns for each group to get new customers.
2. Raises your brand’s reputation – social media advertising leads to the growing online popularity of your brand. Business pages in social networks accumulate new users and form a unique platform for customer interaction.
3. Allows A/B testing – you can test various promotional campaigns in social media networks. Here you pay only per click for people who are your target customers. You can choose which ad types perform better and which ones are not worth spending a dollar on. Most platforms have installed analytics to perform such testing. You can apply specific social media analytical tool to control your performance across different networks and choose the ones with the highest conversion rates.

The real challenge here is to understand where to start your first campaign, which ad type to choose and how it works within each social media network.

Investigate the Brief Guide for Building Your First Social Media Ads Campaign

Many small businesses start social media ads campaign without a certain budget estimate. Such an approach leads to limited return-on-investment from such promotional efforts. Companies lose time and money in the process. Keeping this problem in mind we prepared a brief guide to prepare your first campaign like a pro.

Step 1. Determine your goals
Each business has its own goals. To start any marketing effort you have to determine what you plan to achieve at the end. Whether you plan to boost traffic to a website or build strong engagement among target customers, choose the most important one for your first social media advertisement.

Step 2. Choose social media platform for your needs
Each social media platform has its own benefits and drawbacks. The key to success is to match your goals to the opportunities each platform offers for their realization. For example, Facebook ads are the best for B2B audience and suit for building awareness and connections. Instagram works best for building engagement with followers. Twitter ads help to attract customers to your site and grow brand awareness. Remember to choose one or two platforms as a start to distribute your budget effectively.

Step 3. Know your customers
When you start working on social media ads, find a proper audience for targeting. Facebook is a proper network to start as Facebook ads creator allows to target on interests and behaviors of the audience, as well as to consider their demographic characteristics. Test various targeting options to succeed.

Step 4. Select the ads type
Choose ad types to determine the perfect approach for your clients in each network of your interest. The moment Facebook offers a comprehensive variety of ad formats for any customer. Try several ad types and make experiments through A/B testing to determine the most effective one. Use the winning format for the final campaign and control its performance.

Step 5. Choose the advertising budget
You can spend one dollar per click or one million dollars. It is your choice as to which budget to set up for your campaigns. There is not a certain amount to pay. When you place you social media advertisement, it recommends a certain bid according to your goals. In most cases, the following factors will impact the cost of your ads: the goal of the advertisement, its form, type of target audience and target location.

Step 6. Test and analyze the results
Use should use analytics to investigate, which of your marketing efforts are the most effective following your initial goals. Investigate this social media analytics tools overview and determine the one fitting your needs. Remember that your best tool should have good representation features to have clear insights about your best performing ads.